Cylindrical mirror analyzers are known in the art for use in scientific analysis of charged particles. Cylindrical mirror analyzers may be utilized to analyze the energy of charged particles such as electrons or ions in applications such as Auger electron spectroscopy, photoemission spectroscopy, low energy ion scattering and mass spectroscopy, for example. Typically, a charged particle source such as a crystal is bombarded with an excitation source which may be for example a beam of electrons, photons or x-rays. Upon bombardment of the source charged particles are emitted therefrom and received by the cylindrical mirror analyzer for detection and recording of the characteristic energy spectra exhibited by the charged particles. The amount of energy required to emit the charged particles from the source or various other atomic processes may be thereby experimentally determined, for example.
Previous cylindrical mirror analyzers have been large and bulky requiring fixed placement or placement on a complex manipulator to insert and manipulate the analyzer into an analysis position. The reason that prior cylindrical mirror analyzers have been large and bulky is that to attain high instrumental resolution larger diameter cylindrical mirror analyzers are generally required; thus the prior art teaches away from a reduced sized cylindrical mirror analyzer having high resolution. However, to date, no cylindrical mirror analyzer has been produced of a sufficiently reduced size and placed upon a simple linear motion feed-through drive. No cylindrical mirror analyzer has been constructed of a small enough size to be mounted on a simple linear motion manipulator while simultaneously having great enough resolution to perform meaningful charged particle analysis.
Thus, despite the efforts of those skilled in the art, there still exists a need for a versatile reduced sized cylindrical mirror analyzer which has a level of instrumental resolution suitable for charged particle spectroscopy and energy analysis.